Events
Visions of Wallingford: Neighborhood Learning Through Collaborative Filmmaking
Date: Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024
Time: 12-1 p.m.
Location: 205 Lockwood Library, National AI Institute for Exceptional Education
Talk Abstract: Addressing the planet’s most urgent socio-ecological challenges requires coordination across individuals, institutions, the built environment, and the natural world. This kind of coordination is complex and involves learning at different scales of practice. In this presentation I describe my dissertation work, which seeks to better understand learning at the scale of the neighborhood, through a collaborative filmmaking project. Residents of a predominantly white, densifying Seattle neighborhood led a series of local walking tours, filmed these tours, and assembled the footage into a documentary film. By theorizing civic learning as a semiotic process, I examine how discourses related to neighborhood and community life inform participants’ modes of expression; and how these modes of expression are laminated into modes of relation over the course of the study. Findings show that discourses of care, accessibility, and groundedness emerge and transform through participants’ ongoing place-storying and infrastructuring efforts. From this analysis, I suggest implications for planners, education researchers, and others interested in creating civic media and designing civic learning environments.
About the Speaker
Ari Hock, PhD, is a postdoc in the Institute for Learning Sciences. He studies learning "in the wild"—in public spaces, neighborhoods and cities. Ari is interested in how communities coalesce and align their work through collaboration, conflict and storytelling to address large, societal challenges.
Designing the Future of Learning: Collective Embodied Play in Mixed Reality for Young Children
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024
Time: 12-1 p.m.
Location: 205 Lockwood Library, National AI Institute for Exceptional Education
Talk Abstract: With the rapid development of technology, young children now have access to various technologies such as tablets, VR/AR, and AI. More importantly, there remain questions about how we can use such technology to support young children’s learning through interaction in rich sociocultural contexts. Building on Cultural Historically Activity Theory (CHAT) and Learning Embodied Activity Framework (LEAF), my work focuses on designing age-appropriate science learning activities within a Mixed Reality environment. In my presentation, she will first showcase her designs for collective embodied play that facilitate science modeling in MR. Next, I will address the challenges of assessing embodied learning in MR environments through traditional methods. I will share my mixed methods approaches to documenting young learners' collective embodied learning, offering a comprehensive view of their educational experiences.
About the Speaker
Xintian Tu, PhD, is a postdoctoral associate at the UB Institute for Learning Sciences, where she explores the cutting edge of how young children learn through play and technology. With a PhD in learning sciences and a minor in inquiry methodology from Indiana University, Xintian specializes in designing immersive and interactive learning environments, including mixed reality, to foster and capture children's learning in dynamic ways. Her research interests fall into embodied learning, play and advanced technology, aiming to create transformative educational experiences for young learners.
Collaborative Map Building to Engage a Rural Community’s Locally-Held, Landscape-Based Climate Knowledge
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024
Time: 12-1 p.m.
Location: 205 Lockwood Library, National AI Institute for Exceptional Education
Talk Abstract: Climate change threats are ever increasing, forcing communities to ask: what do they value and how are they going to protect it? Community-based climate education should play a central role in supporting equitable local decisions regarding local responses to climate challenges. However, there is little research about how to best support communities, especially rural communities that may be skeptical of climate change, to see how climate change is affecting their landscapes. Guided by the perspectives and practices of critical data science and story listening, I frame my research around data and story. Prior work has considered the role of climate data within environmental education and story within community scholarship, but there is still a need to explore expanded notions of data within community learning and the role of community-held stories in local decision-making. My work focuses on how local, personally held landscape and climate data might complement and extend local, institutionally held data and how map building might support data-rich storytelling and listening. In this talk I will share my community-based work building a map with six residents of a conservative-leaning, rural community and how collaborative map design supported participants to convene knowledge about local landscape and climate, ratify that knowledge through inclusion onto a public map, and ultimately inform community decision making. I found the collaborative map building process allowed local, often generationally held, climate and landscape knowledge to become community-held understanding, pointing to a pathway for engaging community members in understanding how local and beyond-local socio-cultural values and systems are physically embodied in their local landscapes.
About the Speaker
Heather Killen, PhD, is a postdoctoral associate for the Institute for Learning Sciences where she is motivated to help people navigate the ever-increasing challenges of climate change. Her transdisciplinary learning sciences research unites science and data science education, climate science, civic engagement, and design to explore the space between science and community and how each can support the other. She grounds her scholarship in her experience growing up and living in rural communities and her previous work as an ecologist, where she witnessed how academic ways of knowing could overlook community-held scientific knowledge. Heather earned her PhD in Technology, Learning, and Leadership from the College of Education at the University of Maryland and holds a master’s degree in biology from the Boston University Marine Program at Woods Hole. Prior to her focus on understanding how communities engage in science learning, she worked as an ecologist for federal, state, and tribal governments, served as biology faculty for a rural community college in Arizona, and led citizen science and curriculum development for the Fossil Atmospheres Project, housed within the Paleobiology Department of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Heather has also lived and taught abroad, primarily in Japan, and spent time living and working at the U.S. research station McMurdo in Antarctica.
dándoles sus flores // Giving Them Their Flowers: Youth Participatory Archives and WOC Digital Art Exhibitions as Intergenerational Sites of Learning
Date: Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024
Time: 12-1 p.m.
Location: 205 Lockwood Library, National AI Institute for Exceptional Education
Talk Abstract: Chicanas and other women of color (WOC) have long centered embodied knowledge and storytelling as a critical part of intergenerational healing and learning. However, these experiences are not typically accounted for and are often invisibilized. Dr. Wendy Barrales, PhD explores what we might learn when we attune, document, and account for intergenerational WOC experiences across time and space. Grounded in arts-based methods and feminista embodied knowledge, this research showcases the creation of the Women of Color Archive (WOCArchive), a digital storytelling project preserving the stories of matriarchs of color. Through an emphasis on the feminist praxis of process over product, Barrales’s purpose is twofold: first, to describe how the digital art pieces and archive were co-created alongside youth and showcased at a public art exhibition and, second, to center and celebrate WOC as experts and knowledge producers. Through documenting, preserving, and amplifying their stories, Barrales's research attempts to begin giving women of color their flowers.
About the Speaker
Wendy Barrales, PhD, is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist and Postdoctoral Associate at New York University's Department of Teaching and Learning. Dr. Barrales merges art, archiving, and digital storytelling to amplify the experiences of women of color. Barrales was the founding Adviser of Curriculum and Design of an all-girls STEM high school in Brooklyn, where she was the inaugural chair of Ethnic Studies.
After a decade as a public school teacher, Barrales continues to support educators through the Computer Science for All initiative, as an Induction Mentor at Teachers College, Columbia University and facilitating workshops on political education with the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE). Her work has been awarded or funded by the American Association of University Women, the National Science Foundation, the George Lucas Educational Foundation and the National Women’s Studies Association.
The International Society of the Learning Sciences Annual Meeting
The International Society of the Learning Sciences is an interdisciplinary society dedicated to the research of learning in all of its forms. Their annual conference will be hosted by the University at Buffalo in 2024 with the theme:
"Learning as a cornerstone of healing, resilience and community"
Date: June 10-14, 2024
Learning in Action: Applying Learning Sciences to Tackle Social Challenges
Join us as we explore the pivotal role of learning sciences in addressing societal issues. A distinguished panel of experts will discuss the intersection of research, design, and interdisciplinary collaboration in shaping the future of the field.
Date: Friday, May 3, 2024
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Location: 120 Clemens Hall, University at Buffalo, North Campus
Featured Panelists
Philip Bell is the Shauna C. Larson Chair in Learning Sciences, director of the Institute for Science + Math Education, and professor of education at the University of Washington Seattle. He was a founding member of the Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences and served on the committee that authored the NASEM Framework for K-12 Science Education in 2012, which led to the development of the Next Generation Science Standards for K-12 science education. He edits the practitioner learning resource collection.
Susan R. Goldman is a distinguished professor emerita of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Psychology, and Education at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the International Society of the Learning Science, and of the Society for Text and Discourse. She is a founding co-director of UIC’s Learning Sciences Research Institute.
Brian K. Smith is the Honorable David S. Nelson Chair in Education, and associate dean for research at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College. He also holds an appointment in BC’s Department of Computer Science. He has directed research and program development in information sciences and STEAM education at the National Science Foundation, Drexel University, Penn State, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the MIT Media Lab.
Candace Thille is an associate professor of education at Stanford University and faculty director of workforce and adult learning at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. Previously, she was the Director of Learning Science at Amazon.com and the founding director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University.